Go Ahead – Update Your Storage Operating System in the Middle of the Day

November 14, 2014

When the data storage industry’s top bloggers gathered in Silicon Valley last week for Storage Field Day 6, we showed them our latest innovations in Adaptive Flash, InfoSight, cloud solutions and OpenStack integration. (The full video presentations are available here if you’re interested in digging in more.)

During my presentation of InfoSight, I blurted out a comment that 61% of all Nimble software updates are done during the customer’s prime-time business hours.

Well, I got called out on that stat during the meeting, because, frankly, that does sound outrageous! What kind of storage admin would upgrade a crucial piece of infrastructure in the middle of the day when it’s being hammered by users running business-critical apps? You can see it all on the “InfoSight Update: A Year Later” video – lots of back-pedaling, a few side-steps, tears welling up. It was a great show.

Since then, I’ve had a few sleepless nights, worrying about whether I had broadcast incorrect information to zillions of loyal Nimble Storage customers and fans alike. Then I recalled a blog I had written three years ago on our non-disruptive software updates (here ya go), so I looked back to see what outlandish claims I had made. Lo and behold, the blog actually does cite 55% of software updates being done during prime-time!

Now I’m beginning to wonder, maybe even doubt myself. I mean what is it: 55%, 61%, 10%? Really, what’s the bottom line here?

So, I used InfoSight to do a bit of a research, and here’s what we found on our two most recent GA (General Availability) release streams (Nimble OS 2.0 and 2.1), which currently represent more than 60% of our install base, representing thousands of customers:

So, depending on how you define your business hours, Nimble customers really do perform software updates 55% to 67% of the time during their prime business hours! Of course, we still recommend that you run software updates during non-peak hours, just in case any issues arise.

Now that that’s resolved, I’m going home to get a restful night’s sleep.